Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Green Real Estate Doesn't Mean Fake Palm Trees

It seems that green real estate is really in and now everyone is onboard. Not only the environmentalist, but also the unions, the builders, the government and even all the citizens are all for Green real estate. What is very interesting to note is the extreme lengths that commercial real estate developers will go to, in order to try to promote their projects is green.

Not long ago I was at a local city planning commission and a builder had a project, and he spent half of the presentation talking about how his project was environmentally friendly, took advantage of alternative energy, and was on the leading edge of green technologies. He even went so far as to note that the cell phone tower on the property looked just like a palm tree, and at first glance you could even tell it was a cell tower.

Still, what does Green real estate have to do with fake cell towers that look like palm trees? Nothing, absolutely nothing and this led me to wonder if we were taking this green movement a little too far, covering up the truth, hiding the facts, and pretending to be the "big greeny" that we really aren't.

Although to this particular real estate developers credit, he did have solar panels, special double-pained windows, floor heating, an architecture that promoted use of the sun to help control the climate inside, it's too bad we don't build all of our buildings this way, and it's too bad we are starting now. If all of our buildings were energy-efficient we'd save a whole lot of energy, and increase efficiency, we should have done this decades ago. Please consider all this.